Novel data intensive applications and the diversification of data processing platforms have changed data management significantly over the last decade. In this changed environment, the expressiveness of the traditional relational algebra is often insufficient and data management systems have started to provide more powerful special purpose programming languages. However, these languages create a tight coupling between applications and specific systems that can hinder further development on both sides of the equation. The goal of this article is to start a discussion on the future of platform independent programming models for data processing that re-establish the separation of application logic and implementation details that used to be a cornerstone of data management systems. As a guide for that discussion, we introduce several recent related works on that topic and also outline our own contribution, the Analytical Calculus.